Author: Iulian Circo

Transparency and visibility in development is a big deal. And so it should be. Ca. 150 billion USD are spent on aid/ development projects every year globally. Most of this money is public money — taxpayer’s hard earned cash — and much of this money...

Another year has passed, the second full year in Triggerise’s existence. It’s been awesome: we have more than doubled in size, successfully entering into a number of interesting partnerships that provided both innovation opportunities and access to funding. We started…

The theory behind social impact bonds is pretty straight forward: Investors provide upfront money for development/ social programs, based on an informed assumption/ risk that these programs will achieve certain outcomes/ milestones. If these outcomes are met, an underwriter (traditional donor...

This is a short (and cleaned up) version of an internal post written for Triggerise's Global Team. For context, in 2016 our organization grew from a handful of jacks-of-all-trades to a fully functional global team, based across 6 different locations...

There is a lot of excitement around Unconditional Direct Cash Transfers (UDCT). Has been for a while, actually. The idea is simple: transfer cash to people directly, instead of funding large incumbents who, more often than not, do not reach the intended impact...

Here is a fact: Informal economies are the rule, not the exception. Have a look at these two graphs - they show total transactions by retail channels per country (Sub-Saharan Africa only). The first one shows transactions across all retail sectors...

Ask anyone in this business: the aid industry in general and donors in particular have a very low tolerance to risk. Donors will always award the majority of their money to Low-risk programs implemented by solid, low-risk partners. Innovation, particularly...

Newsflash: The world is changing fast, the future is not what it used to be and all that. It used to be people went to school, specialized and that took care of that: they milked that good old education for…

Any organization is defined by its people. This is particularly true of organizations such as ours, forever evolving at the intersection of of non-profit and entreprise and spanning sectors as diverse as health, trade and finance. The nature of our work puts…